RAPD/SCAR approaches for identification of adulterant breeds’ milk in dairy products

Abstract

Food safety and quality are nowadays a major consumers’ concern. In the dairy industry the fraudulent addition of cheaper/lower-quality milks from nonlegitimate species/breeds compromises the quality and value of the final product. Despite the already existing approaches for identification of the species origin of milk, there is little information regarding differentiation at an intra-species level. In this protocol we describe a low-cost, sensitive, fast, and reliable analytical technique—Random Amplified Polymorphic DNA/Sequence Characterized Amplified Region (RAPD/SCAR)—capable of an efficient detection of adulterant breeds in milk mixtures used for fraudulent manufacturing of dairy products and suitable for the detection of milk adulteration in processed dairy foods.